I’ve become a Greek yogurt convert in the past few months. My favorite dessert, which I indulge in almost daily, is plain Chobani Greek yogurt with a teaspoon of manuka honey and some pecans. Who needs ice-cream anymore?

By the way, not all Greek yogurts are created equal. We’ve bought “The Greek Gods” brand on Sunday, and I am suffering though it.

The only downside of Chobani is that it’s not organic, but the ice-cream that I used to eat was not organic either, so I am still on the path to improvement here. 6

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Vicky says:May 1, 2012 @ 16:44

yum yum yum and yum.
I think fresh direct has organic greek yogurt. We often buy stonyfield. Ever since Audrey was born we (meaning I ) converted to all dairy and eggs to be organic. In the past months I started to only buy organic chicken for the entire family as well as apples, strawberries and blueberries.

They say anything with thin skin should be organic. For ex strawberries, but oranges have thick skin so no need to spend the extra on organic.

PS. just learned the apples are the #1 fruit to be sprayed with who knows what. So if you are going to pick one thing to buy organic. Pick apples.

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Alёna says:May 1, 2012 @ 22:45

Yes, I read bad things about conventional apples too, but still buy them more often than organic kind. If I give them to Aroshka, I peel the skin off.

We consistently buy 3 organic things only — eggs, milk and Aroshka’s yogurt (although he is not a big fan and eats very little diary overall). I try to buy other diary products organic when possible as well (butter and sour cream mostly).

It’s great that you’ve switched to better chicken for the whole family. I’ve started to buy “natural” chicken, which is not as great as organic, but a step up from the conventional one I think. I also absolutely hate the idea of farmed fish, so we bought wild Alaskan king salmon last time and I think that’s what we’ll keep doing in the future.

Ah, this whole thing with food drives me crazy (scares the hell out of me) at times. I think that if we ever buy a house in suburbia, I’ll grow a lot of stuff myself and will have some fruit trees. Some of my fondest childhood memories are about summer times at my grandmother’s house, where we picked fresh cherries, gooseberries, strawberries, plums, apples, pears, etc, etc right from her yard.

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Misha says:May 2, 2012 @ 17:27

What is the difference between organic and natural? Base on the article natural is better than organic.

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A small collection of random observations and random photographs from our Japan trip that has been accumulated as I was writing the rest of the posts about Japan.

The end of November in Japan is a great time to visit. We expected to see naked trees, but instead we saw plenty of autumn colors and a lot of green.

There are a lot of people all over the place wearing face masks — in subway, on the streets, at work. Pretty much at any time in any public place you will see somebody doing this. People are courteous enough to keep their colds and flu to themselves. Too bad it is so uncommon where we live.

When we first decided to buy something from a vending machine (which are everywhere) we were surprised that a hot bottle fell out of the machine. Turns out that vending machines sell hot drinks as well as cold ones. You can tell the hot drinks by a red label under the bottle and a cold by a blue ones.

You can buy a real unsweetened hot or cold, green or black tea from a vending machine.

We often had a hard time finding a trash can on the street, yet all the streets and subway stations are impeccably clean. Every train station has a very clean public restroom.

Everything except for the food costs obscene amounts of money. A Nikon — Japanese made — lens that I can get from B&H for $1,999 costs $3,000. Casio Pathfinder watch that I bought here for under $400 costs over $600. A compact flash card that I bought from Amazon for $55 costs $125 there. Dollar is extremely weak these days.

You are better off using your credit and debit cards while paying 3% for every transaction than exchanging money. The going exchange rate is going to end being worse than your credit card company will give you with that 3% charge included.

While the spoken English of most Japanese is better than my Japanese — it’s not far off. They can handle a very basic English sentence, yet anything slightly more complex causes them to keep repeating what you first basic sentence was and laugh uncontrollably. It appears to us that when they are embarrassed they laugh.

In all our time in Japan I have seen many Japanese and many European cars and only one American car — some GMC truck. Japanese people seem to be quite a bit more patriotic with respect to their car choices than American people are.

People are extremely polite, but you will never know what they are really thinking about you. It’s as if everyone has a dual personality there. That somehow made us somewhat uncomfortable.

In Japan it is not customary to tip and could even be considered rude. That felt quite liberating actually.

Japanese people dress very stylishly. Women wear super sexy skirts, stockings and boots. Man wear western suits with ties during the weekdays. I don’t think I have seen these kind of seas of suits even in Manhattan.

Japanese people have a pretty strict etiquette when it comes to public transportation behavior. No-one talks on the cellphone, no-one really talks to each other for that matter, or when they do, it is done in a quite manner. This made us feel uncomfortable at times when we wanted to discuss some things during our long bullet train rides (we just kept our voices down).

Schoolchildren wear uniform. I love it! I think it really is great for both children and parents alike.

As Danya mentioned, tips are not customary. The tax is also included in the menu price, so basically you pay the exact amount that you see. So our $50 per person meal in Japan costs less than $40 per person dinner in NY after taxes and tips are added.

Again, as Danya said, people dress very well in Japan. I was glad that I brought skirts and dresses. I wore jeans ones — when we were moving from Tokyo to Osaka and had luggage with us. Other than that wearing pants would make me feel not feminine.

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Vicky says:May 8, 2012 @ 15:22

Didn’t you just love hot tea from the vending machine.
We were hooked on it.

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Daniel says:May 8, 2012 @ 15:39

Yeah, Alena misses it very much. I liked it too. I just miss all of it — Japan really is special.

Прочитал с большый удовольствием Алёнин update and want to repeat her last paragraph too — I can’t believe how much I love him. Just thinking about Arosha never fails to brings a smile to my face.

A couple of things to add to Alena’s post — yesterday, Arosha, for the first time fell out of his bed. Luckily we put down a sleeping bag right in front of his bed specifically for this purpose — it was bound to happen sooner or later. We went into his bedroom, Alena picked him up and put him back into his bed and he didn’t even wake up.

Another funny word that Arosha likes saying that Alena didn’t mention is “кива” — красиво, красивый — beautiful. A couple of weeks ago I put stickers on his motorized car and told him that this way it looks pretty. To this day he keeps repeating — “Папа тинка кива!” — papa made little car pretty.

He also says кива when we wash his head — once we mentioned to him that he needs to wash his head so he would look good at the restaurant on Lina’s birthday — and since then when we wash his head he agrees to do it to be “кива”.

Two days ago I’ve finally decided that I want to get Diablo III. Even though it will be very different game from WoW and SWTOR I think it is something that I might enjoying playing even more since it is meant to be a single player game. I have a lot of history with Diablo.

The first Diablo was actually the very first RPG game that I have ever played. RPG is the only type of game that I would play these days — and that’s been the case for a long time now. I’ve just never been interested as much in any other genre of games. Diablo II1 was actually the first game that I have bought — first one was given to me by an old friend. I played it all through to the end, later on bought an expansion and finished that too.

So I figured that I’d like to get a Collector’s Edition of the game. But as often is the case — procrastination (putting off the decision to the last moment) resulted in CE version being sold out everywhere — Amazon, Best Buy, etc. I decided to just stop by a Best Buy store in the morning on my way to work, ask if they have CE available and just get a normal version if not.

My Best Buy of choice for today’s morning was a store located near the Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn. I pulled into the parking lot, got out of my car and the door to Best Buy got unlocked right in front of me. I walked in and proceeded to the gaming section. Asked about the CE version and was told to wait while a lady would check for me. She came back with 2 boxes and said that it’s all that they have.

Right at that moment another sales guy run up and said that she can’t sell any to me since these were pre-ordered. She said that she checked and no pre-orders showed up. The guy told her to not ring it up since he wanted to go and check himself. She decided not to listen to him. I swiped my credit card and the transaction went through.

At that moment this guy returned — yelling: “Stop! You can’t sell these! They ARE pre-ordered!” Her only reply at that point was — “Oops!” I wasn’t letting this game out of my hands. Yet another sales guys showed up with a receipt showing that he had pre-ordered both of the copies. I took that as my queue to get lost and left.

I actually didn’t expect it to be rare, but right after I bought mine I phoned our local store at Caesar’s Bay and another one near my office in Connecticut and neither one had any in stock. So I’m pretty happy with how that turned out. However the moral of the story is this — never pre-order anything at Best Buy.

I haven’t played the game itself yet, but just wanted to share this little moment of joy with you all.

P.S. I have a couple of guest invite codes — allows a friend to play through Act I of the game that I can share with you if you want it. I gave one of them out to Andrey already.